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World Solar Photovoltaic Installations

Solar PV Dataset

The solar industry has witnessed remarkable declines in of costs during the past 25 years for a number of reasons including technological advancements and industry expansion. The benchmark component that is typically referred to when reporting cost trends is the solar module and many institutions publish the global average selling price for the modules on a regular basis.

Indeed, the module price serves as a good indicator of developments in the solar industry and technology. However, the module price is unable to capture regional differences that arise when building solar PV systems. Variations in labor costs, legal costs, taxes and cost of capital between countries are some of the reasons why the same plant would have very different costs when built in different places. The same also applies to the levelized cost of energy; solar conditions as well as maintenance costs vary across countries, which result in different operational costs. The variations in capital expenditure and operational costs between countries become even more pronounced when considering the size of the installed system.

To capture regional differences in capital and generation costs, we have compiled a large collection of data across many geographies for the three typical system sizes (i.e. residential, commercial, and utility). The costs are provided and accompanied by the assumptions that were used to arrive at these actual costs including interest rates, solar irradiation, technology type, etc, where these assumptions are given in the source.

Users can compare the costs in a variety of ways depending on the filters that are used. For instance, a user can see how generation costs change if the financial assumptions are altered. For this reason, the Toolkit provides an excel-based Analyzing Tool to aid in experimenting and evaluating different scenarios. The raw data is also provided if a user is interested in performing further analysis. To summarize, this tool kit provides the following: